MR. BUCHANAN'S GIFT TO LOCAL STUDENTS IS EVERLASTING

"To wander is the miller’s joy, to wander. To wander is the miller’s joy, to wander.

A wretched miller he must be who never fancied to be free and wander, and wander, and wander, and wander."  Wilhelm Muller’s (Wandering) Die Schoene Muellerin

By Juan Montoya

To a Southmost barrio kid with little background in classical music and whose total knowledge of the genre was the William Tell Overture from watching the Lone Ranger on the neighbor's black and white television, the day we got Miss Ann Anderson as a music teacher opened up another world.

Miss Anderson was not only many of the Cromack Elementary boys' first crush of puppy love, but she was also our introduction to classic choral music. I can still remember most parts (and words) of the Sound of Music from singing the verses in class at the Cromack auditorium.

Like, for example, "So, Long, Farewell," when one of the Trapp Family Singers daughters wants to stay with the adults in the ball.
"There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall, and the bells in the steeple too. And up in the nursery, an absurd little bird Is popping up to say, "Cuckoo cuckoo!"

"No!" was her father's reply. 

For some reason or other, Miss Anderson said I had an invitation to sing in the Brownsville Boys Choir that met every Saturday morning at the Clearwater choir hall on Palm Avenue. I joined and met Mr. Robert Buchanan, the director of the choir.

Mr. Buchanan (and no one ever called him Bob) had us sing the song above  written by German composer Muller in the early 1800s. It was different to me, a migrant student whose musical experiences didn't extend much beyond polkas and corridos. It was something totally new. And the concepts – escape from drudgery – appealed to someone who looked beyond the typical fare and the long row of sugar beets extending into the heat mirages in the horizon.
Always attentive and gracious, on the podium the musical muse seemed to possess him and – in a state of precise agitation – it used his body as a baton to make itself understood to us. 

The local newspaper today contains the obituary of Mr. Buchanan, who passed away at 89.

The new music theater at Hanna High School bears his name in recognition of what he contributed to the edification of our students in the Brownsville Independent School District.

Eventually, Mr Buchanan married Miss Anderson, and by reading the obituary, I see where she and their children still survive him. My condolences to her and her family.

The cultural enrichment that this couple brought to barrio children like me cannot be measured in money. Instead, it is measured in the appreciation and love of music that enriches all our cultures and all of us as individuals.

I never got a chance to thank Miss Anderson or Mr. Buchanan for giving me the key to that door of enlightenment and a peek at other cultures' music. I do so now.

At times I burst into old songs I learned in Mr. Buchanan's Boys Choir such as the "The Erl-King," a composition by Franz Schubert based on a Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe poem about an anxious young boy being carried home at night by his father on horseback. 

As the song unfolds, the son seems to see and hear beings his father does not; the reader cannot know if the father is indeed aware of their presence, but he chooses to comfort his son, asserting reassuringly naturalistic explanations for what the child sees – a wisp of fog, rustling leaves, shimmering willows. 

Finally, the child shrieks that he has been attacked. The father rides faster to their home to escape. There he recognizes that the boy is dead.

The grief in the final verses and music is overwhelming. So is our grief today to learn of Mr. Buchanan's death.